1. Check for Updates

No surprises here. Even though you might have just installed Ubuntu 15.10, you will surely want to have all your packages updated to their latest stable version.

This should provide better stability and in some cases performance of your system. To check for new updates, you can start the “Software Update” application. For that purpose simply click the Unity button and type “Software update“:

Update Ubuntu 15.10

The software will automatically check for newly released updates and install them automatically as shown.

Checking Software Updates

Installing Software Updates

Alternatively, you can start a terminal application and run the following command:

$ sudo apt-get update

Installing Updates from Commandline

2. Look and Feel

Ubuntu hasn’t change its outlook in quite some time now (few years if I’m correct). The ambiance and radiance theme are not looking bad at all, but they look somehow old compared to other operating systems. But let’s not forget that Linux is flexible and it can be customized. You can change the appearance of your Ubuntu by using the “System Settings” -> Appearance.

Customize Ubuntu Desktop

Here you can select:

Different Desktop wallpaper

Choose different theme (quite limited at first, but you can install more)

Change the icon size of Unity

3. Install Unity Tweak Tool

If the “Appearance” menu is not providing enough settings for you, you may add some additional tweaking features by installing Unity Tweak Tool. It can be easily installed from the Ubuntu Software Center. Simply type “Unity tweak tool” and install it:

Install Unity Tweak Tool

Unity Tweak Tool

Unity Tweak Tool allows you to greatly customize Unity’s settings including – autohide, icons theme, panel settings, behavior, switcher and many many others. It’s fair to say that you can play with this tool for hours until you finally decide which settings are the best.

4. Install Graphics Drivers

Using the proper drivers for your graphics card is important cause you can get better experience on your system, without the laggy movement of different windows. Not only that, but you can also play games on your Ubuntu Linux system which will require the proper drivers to be installed.

To install your graphic drivers, simply start the Unity dash and type “Additional Drivers” and click on the icon. A new window will appear which will automatically search the proper drivers:

Install Graphic Drivers

When found, choose the appropriate version and install it.

5. Install Media Codecs

Media is great part of the desktop experience. Whether is for listening music or watching movies, installing media codecs is a must! Due to some patent issues, the codecs are not included in the default Ubuntu install.

You can however choose to install them upon Ubuntu install. In case you have missed that, you can easily install them from here or you can directly install from ‘Ubuntu Software Center‘.

Install Ubuntu Restricted Extras

6. Install GIMP – Image Editor

GIMP is a free image manipulation software. It’s one of the best in it’s category for Linux and it’s your best friend if you need to edit an image on your Linux machine.

7. Integrate Online Account

Ubuntu supports different type of online accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and many others. You can easily integrate them via Unity Dash -> type “Online Accounts“. In the new window you will be able to choose which accounts to configure:

Add Online Accounts in Ubuntu

8. Install Google Chrome

This is probably the first thing I do whenever I install a new operating system. Google Chrome is currently the most used web browsers and if you have not given it a change yet, I highly encourage you to do so. It’s amazingly fast, easy to use and comes with thousands of useful extensions.

To install Google Chrome simply go to the following article and download and install the .deb package that matches your OS (32-bit or 64-bit) as shown in the article.

I am a bachelor in computer science and a Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator. Currently working as a Senior Technical support in the hosting industry. In my free time I like testing new software and inline skating.

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16 Responses

I tried doing a fresh install of Ubuntu and while I finished the install and even got so far as installing Chrome, media codecs, etc, When I turned my PC off and went to use it the next day,

I received an error where my monitor could not be found. I have tried all sorts of ways to fix this, but still, nothing works. I don’t know what to do as I wiped the drive and tried another install…to the same end. How do I fix this and use my system again?

The #11 Spotify advice is VERY bad from a security perspective.
You should never recommend for people to put an old encryption library with known vulnerabilities on their system. The better solution is to pull Spotify from their “testing” repos. Spotify team already made the change to use correct libgcrypt in that version.
Just change the one line in your instructions to this:
$ echo deb http://repository.spotify.com testing non-free | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/spotify.list
And delete that entire 2nd part advising people to download the old lib11. Cheers.

Sadly, the “move window controls from left side to right side” no longer functions in the Unity Tweak Tools. Ubuntu has set that bug to “wontfix”, forcing your unity desktop to be a Mac instead of a, you know, real computer :)

The idea behind this tutorial is to show what you can do to add more functionality to your Ubuntu 15.10 installation. It’s not necessary to use all that software. You can pick the one that you really need to use.

First, I want to apologize for leaving that obnoxious comment. I appreciate that you are trying to be helpful and I appreciate that it takes a lot of work to put together an article for publication. Partly, it’s me lashing out because I have seen a lot of similar “Top 10 Things to Do…” none of which I find very useful. That’s a personal problem and has nothing to do with you. I’m sure there are some people who read your article will learn something from it.

Having said that, I do want to offer a bit of criticism that I hope can be received as constructive. If what you say is true, then the headline for this article is misleading. “27 thing TO do …” implies that you should do all of them. Like you said in your comment, “27 things YOU CAN do …” would be a better headline for this article.
What makes that headline worse is that, if we take #10 for example, you list applications without explaining what they are used for. If this article is meant for newbies, then I think that at least a word or two, or better yet a link to the project, would serve them better. Otherwise it reads as if they need to download everything to get “support for media files”, which is very vague.

tl;dr I don’t like this article, but I don’t want to be a dick about it.

Thank you for the feedback Arthur. When you put it that way, indeed the subject may seem misleading to a newbie user. I don’t mind being criticized for my work and point has been taken :) Furthermore thank you for taking the time to go through the article and express your opinion. I encourage all readers to do that!

I will have a word with our editor and see if we can improve the quality of the article, per your recommendation.